Living the Tension

When my wife turned sixty, our daughters gave her a week-long, all-expense-paid trip to New England to shop for antiques. They gave her shopping cash. They also said they would pay for one other person to accompany her, so I got to go along. (I have no memory of what they gave me for my sixtieth.)

Vermont was the most impressive part of that, my first, trip through New England. My desk at home, indeed my entire office, and my pickup truck all are wildernesses
of clutter . I think I liked Vermont because it was uncluttered. I’ve never seen anything so clean, neat, and well-trimmed. Uncluttered, but not sterile like I have always perceived German communities to be.

I like the uncluttered. I like the Kansas Flint Hills, the Oklahoma Osage country, the deserts of the Southwest; I like “the wide-open spaces.” In art, I am attracted to paintings, especially watercolors, with large uncluttered areas, simple use of space.

I have no sense that I am claustrophobic, but I may be a spaceophile.

Yet I like wild, tangled regions. They offer a multifaceted richness, variety, and mystery. They call for exploration and adventure. They are filled with hidden surprises.

The uncluttered can be sterile, merely empty, a vacuum, boring. Don’t unclutter everything. Brambles and thickets are needed as much as open spaces

If creativity is located where the incongruent is comfortably embraced–as studies indicate that it is–don’t be too anxious to simplify everything. Live the tension between the mess and the well-kept.

But we must traverse the tension. Sometimes truth and life and progress and development require that we move so close to one pole that we appear to be polarized. Either pole, alone, is destructive to some degree.

Whichever we feel the need to move toward, the simple or the complex, “islands of simplicity” and times of solitude are essential. The complications of bramble, thicket, and confusing mystery will show up on their own.

Living these tensions is one way that the dialectic works itself out in the business of working out our lives. Don’t allow yourself to become overwhelmed but don’t get too comfortable.